Collective Intelligence 2012: MIT to host a conference on how new
technologies are dramatically changing the ways people and computers
work together

The conference will be held April 18-20 on the MIT campus in
Cambridge, MA

April 02, 2012 01:04 PM Eastern Daylight Time

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--How do networks like Facebook and Twitter impact social movements? Can
the laws of thermodynamics help explain how Wikipedia entries are
edited? What can the foraging behavior of ants tell us about how data
flows in the Internet? These are just some of the questions that
Collective Intelligence 2012, a conference being held at MIT, will
tackle.

The conference will take place on April 18-20, and is sponsored by the
National Science Foundation. The conference will draw on academic
research from many disciplines—including psychology, economics, computer
science, political science, sociology, and biology—to deepen the
understanding of collective intelligence, and the ways in which it might
influence organizations of the future.

Thomas Malone,professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of
Management anddirector of the MIT Center for Collective
Intelligence, and Luis von Ahn, professor of computer science at
Carnegie Mellon, are co-chairs of the event.

“Collective intelligence has existed at least as long as humans have,
but in the last decade or so a new kind of collective intelligence has
emerged,” says Malone.“With the Internet, it is now
possible--for the first time in human history--to have huge numbers of
people and computers all over the world working together at a scale and
with a degree of collaboration that was never possible before.”

Von Ahn adds: “If you think about mankind’s greatest achievements–the
Pyramids in Egypt, the Panama Canal, or even putting Neil Armstrong on
the moon in 1969 – they were done with the brain power of about 100,000
people. In the past, that was probably the maximum number that could be
coordinated to work effectively on a problem. Until now.”

One goal of the conference is to create a new interdisciplinary field
focused on issues related to collective intelligence. Topics to be
discussed include: crowdsourcing, on-line collaboration, animal
collective intelligence, collective decision-making, and the wisdom of
crowds. “For the most part, research in these different areas has gone
on separately,” says Malone. “We think the time is now right to catalyze
the development of a new forum that brings them together.”

Von Ahn says the conference received more than 100 paper submissions, of
which 18 were selected for oral presentation and 16 for presentation as
posters. The topics include: “Learning to predict the wisdom of crowds,”
“Crowdsourcing collective emotional intelligence,” and “Collaborative
development in Wikipedia.”

“Some of these researchers are trying to answer deep scientific
questions, such as: What are the conditions that lead to collective
intelligence in groups of individuals?” says Malone. “But these
scientific questions also have huge practical implications for how
companies can become more productive and how whole societies can solve
their problems more effectively.”

Speakers include: Yochai Benkler, professor of entrepreneurial legal
studies at Harvard Law School; Iain Couzin, a research fellow in ecology
and evolutionary biology at Princeton University; Deborah Gordon,
professor of biology at Stanford University; Robert Kraut, professor of
human-computer interaction at Carnegie-Mellon University; Rob Miller,
professor computer science at MIT; Scott Page, professor of complex
systems, political science, and economics at the University of Michigan;
Ben Shneiderman, professor of computer science at University of
Maryland, College Park; Justin Wolfers professor of business and public
policy at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Jonathan
Zittrain, professor of law at Harvard Law School.